‘The Wall’ – A moniker that did not quite do justice to Rahul Dravid’s accomplishments

By Rajesh Ramaswamy

 

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) felicitations are over and the hankies and glycerine have been tucked back into the dusty drawers of public memory. But even 20 days after he hung up his battered, war-worn boots, everyone and their aunt on the social networks is bemoaning the retirement of 'The Wall’ - aka Rahul Dravid.

By Rajesh Ramaswamy

 

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) felicitations are over and the hankies and glycerine have been tucked back into the dusty drawers of public memory. But even 20 days after he hung up his battered, war-worn boots, everyone and their aunt on the social networks is bemoaning the retirement of ‘The Wall’ – aka Rahul Dravid.

 

I know I’m in the minority, but was Dravid really ‘The Wall’? I will be the first to admit that the label fits the man so well one could be forgiven for not questioning it. After all, it’s been around so long, it’s inveigled itself insidiously onto his persona, and even his better half may have been wondering how she’d ever drive her hubby up the wall when he owns the copyright in the first place! She’d, by now, be used to buddies asking her, after a Saturday night out, if her hubby had managed to get ‘plastered’… and has probably erected her own protective brick structure to keep out similarly asinine jokes involving Humpty Dumpty and the Berlin lookalike that crumbled in ’89. She’d have even denied herself the simple pleasures of gorging in public on a famous ice-cream brand which shares Rahul’s nick…or even pigging out at that cute little place in Koramangala called ‘Hole in the Wall’ because…err…uhhh…well…ahem…you know…!

 

Oops… I’m allowing myself to get distracted and carried away with his moniker… that’s how easy it is to go with the flow and get walled in – I told you it’s habit-forming! – with the imagery an imaginative label can liberate. So let me come back to my original theory and question whether Dravid was ever a ‘wall’.

 

Now, now…I’d like to caution the rabid Dravid fan that chucking rotten eggs at writers is unethical – even without the 15 degree leeway for a bent elbow! And may also invite a libel suit from the National Egg Coordination Committee who have invested millions in getting our cricketers to endorse an egg as a ‘well-rounded’ square meal (so what if it’s actually oval; we shan’t let irritating things like facts get in the way of a good slogan).

 

All right… all right… I’ll stop going round and round the wall – did I do it again? Getting to the point, Rahul Dravid is not, and was never ‘The Wall’! Calling him one, was, to me, a non-sequitur.

 

True, nobody was more single-mindedly focussed, nobody else guarded his wicket and the team’s interests more doggedly, or was a more cussed customer in a scrap. But to reduce him to a walled-in stature is mildly disrespecting a man who was not really the high priest of stasis that he was made out to be. I know the intent was honourable, but a wall is a passive thing that keeps the undesirables out, and Dravid was not passive in any way. He may not have been the most demonstrative or animated, but there was a steely resolve that concentrated all his energies into a kinetic stillness that was full of purpose and intent.

 

Far from being merely a wall, he was, to borrow from Dutch legend, the boy who plugged the hole in the wall. Like that celebrated boy-hero, Dravid has, time and again, put his hand up whenever the dyke threatened to breach. He’s made a career out of saving India from being overcome by the raging torrents that have threatened to rush in whenever they’ve found a weak spot. The very knowledge of his presence has allowed the others to breathe free and express themselves naturally. For, they knew that he was not just a wall that they could fight behind, but an active warrior who’d go selflessly up and down the order to put his body on the line against the enemy’s battering rams, as the first line of defence, or at numbers 3, 4, 5 and 6, as the nation has demanded of him.

 

Wasn’t this the conscientious soldier who’d even forsaken his natural disinclination, to stand behind the stumps to plug the leaks there, just so that his country could benefit, irrespective of the potential damage to his own reputation?

 

This was a warrior, a man forged in the same fire that tempered the steel of the ancient Spartans, a man who was an indestructible force of nature, not a passive man-made structure… a man who denied himself easy pleasures in pursuit of the greater good, one whose immense value will only slowly seep into the uncomprehending minds of his erstwhile colleagues… when they realise that the hole his absence will leave in the wall of Indian cricket is too big for others to fill.

 

Let us now celebrate a man who didn’t just carry the aspirations of a billion people on his broad shoulders, but also carried a label he didn’t care for too much, with the same uncomplaining resolve and dignity that have been the leitmotif of his career and life. Let us, as a mark of respect, relieve him of one burden at least… and bury the wall once and for all!

 

 

(Rajesh is a former fast bowler who believes he could have been the answer to India’s long prayer for an ‘express’ paceman. He regularly clocked speeds hovering in the late 80’s and occasionally let fly deliveries that touched the 90’s. Unfortunately for him, the selectors were talking ‘mph’, while he was operating in the metric lane with ‘kmph’. But he moved on from that massive disappointment which resulted from what he termed a ‘miscommunication’, and became a communications professional. After a long innings in advertising as a Creative Director, he co-founded a brand consulting firm called Contrabrand. He lives in Chennai and drives down to work in Bangalore…an arrangement that he finds less time consuming and stressful than getting from one end of Bangalore to the other)

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